1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print control apparatus which controls print functions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, when printing is to be executed, print processing devices such as printer drivers obtain data for printing created by an Operating System (OS hereinafter) such as Windows™. Further, a print processing device converts data for printing to a print data format which can be understood by a printer such as PDL or an image, and subsequently transmits and outputs the data. Afterwards, rendering data included in the data for printing is analyzed and the printing operation is modified in accordance with the analysis results. Such a process flow is widely used.
In recent years, leakage of confidential information, such as the list of clients of a corporation, has frequently occurred. When such incidents occur, corporations victimized by such espionage often lose trust, and may end up having to make huge expenditures to cope with the damage and compensation payments. Further, because of the increase in the number of incidents of information leakage, a measure to better cope with information leakage is in demand. Such demand has arisen due to progress in digitalization and mobilization of information and their availability through networks, which enable easy access to a large amount of information and drastically improve ubiquity of information.
As a measure to prevent such leakage of information, a method has been conventionally used which sets access rights to confidential information or storage devices storing such confidential information and restricts users having access to the confidential information. However, when leakage of information is committed by a user who was authorized to access confidential information, this method of information leakage prevention is not adequate.
Further, information to be protected from leakage includes not only those of large corporations that are enormous in volume, but also critical information that may be small in volume. Such information can easily be taken out in printed form, which necessitates security measures to prevent information leakage for printed materials.
In Japanese Patent Laid Open 2005-169672, a print processing device is disclosed which analyzes images or text in the received rendering data, and aborting printing when a predetermined keyword is detected which indicates that the rendering data is not to be printed out.
Conventionally, however, such operation is performed solely by the rendering data included in the data for printing to be used in the printing process, and cannot be performed according to the original file from which the data for printing is generated and used by the application. Accordingly, it is not possible to control printing operations, such as forcibly aborting printing, according to the status of the original file, its storage location, etc.